Tulip Siddiq on the campaign trail. The Daily Mail ran a piece asking where her ‘loyalties lie’ because her aunt is the prime minister of Bangladesh.
Composite: Lucy Young/The Guardian Design Team

When Bim Afolami first started knocking on doors in Hitchin and Harpenden in 2017, not everyone knew exactly what to think of him. Afolami, a 32-year-old Tory, Oxonian and old Etonian of preternatural poise, was in most respects a traditional candidate from Conservative Central Office, so he might have expected a more conventional response from the voters he met along the way. But there was one crucial difference. “Left-leaning voters struggled with it because I was a black Conservative,” he said.

When he first ran for office in 2015 in the much more ethnically diverse Lewisham and Deptford, it was even more of an issue. “It was commented on a lot more by voters who would see a black Conservative candidate and think ‘that’s a bit funny’. They were obsessed with it.”

Even the Tories, who were willing him to succeed, became more scrupulously interested in his candidacy than they might otherwise have been. “People became more interested in your personality because you were different from your predecessor. You felt like you had to be quite careful.”

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In the end, Afolami had more success in safe blue Hitchin and Harpenden than he did in Lewisham and Deptford. In a constituency that is 89% white, he won the seat with a majority of 12,031, which, while it was significantly down on that of his predecessor Peter Lilley, reflected a difficult national climate for Conservatives.

Still, like most black and minority ethnic MPs’ path to the Commons, his experience reveals unexpected hurdles that white candidates do not face.

After that election, the headlines proudly described “the most diverse parliament ever”, with 11 new black and minority ethnic MPs bringing the total to 52. Despite that improvement, at just 8% the overall proportion lags significantly behind that in the general population, where minorities make up more than 13%.

Labour’s Clive Lewis: ‘Parliament is very chummy, very clubby’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

In interviews conducted as part of the Guardian’s Bias in Britain series, minority members of parliament who did make it through that sieving process suggested proclamations of equality were being undermined by a set of unconscious biases that stand in the way of their progress.

In the end, once he found the right seat, Afolami had a relatively easy path to election. He is one of a number of minority Conservative MPs that come from an affluent background, one that eases their passage in white affluent constituencies. To him, he said, it was simply “the world I always knew”.

By putting minority candidates of middle- and upper middle-class backgrounds like Afolami’s in safe seats of familiar economic profile, the Conservative party effectively de-risks the race factor. Research found that black and Asian candidate can face an “ethnic penalty” in elections, seeing lower increases in their vote shares compared to white candidates in the same parties. In order to offset that penalty, minority candidates become limited to the seats that are considered safest.

A similar de-risking mentality seems to be visible in the Labour party. But instead of profiling on the basis of class, they undergo profiling on the basis of race, where candidates are sometimes encouraged to run in areas with more minority ethnic voters.

“You would have to go that extra mile otherwise,” said Bilal Mahmood, a former Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green. In Mahmood’s experience there is no “self-conscious” effort as such to racially profile and match candidates and constituents, but he suggests it would be unrealistic not to reap the benefits of bias when it swings in a candidate’s favour.

“It worked when someone from my background saw me on the doorstep; some were genuinely proud that I was running.” He found little resistance from white voters, whose only comment on his race was that on the phone he “sounded like a white guy”.

This tendency to put minority candidates into a narrow set of seats does not always go down well with prospective MPs. Speaking between votes at the Commons, Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, suggested problems with unconscious bias began in senior members of her own party’s structure. Even though she had grown up locally, some party grandees felt the area was not “ethnic” enough for her to stand a good chance in. She was taken aside and asked whether she “would be better off running somewhere else”.

The intimation was that Hampstead and Kilburn was too white for her to succeed. “I knew I would win,” she said. “I had all the support I needed on the ground.” In the end, she believes, race mattered less than the profilers thought – and she argued that candidates from ethnic minorities could even inspire a healthy curiosity in their backgrounds among white voters.

Q&A

What is unconscious bias, and why is the Guardian reporting on it?

Unconscious or implicit bias is one part of the explanation for why, despite equalities being enshrined in law, minority groups are still at a disadvantage in many parts of life. The term was popularised after US social psychologists devised a way of measuring the prejudices that we are not necessarily aware of – the Implicit Association Test. They published a paper in 1998 claiming that their tool for measuring "the unconscious roots of prejudice" showed that 90-95% of people were susceptible.

While the reliability of that test is now contested, there is overwhelming wider evidence that unconscious bias seeps into decisions that affect recruitment, access to healthcare and outcomes in criminal justice in ways that can disadvantage black and minority ethnic people. One study found that university professors were far more likely to respond to emails from students with white-sounding names. Another showed that white people perceived black faces as more threatening than white faces with the same expression.

In this series, Bias in Britain, we're exploring some of the ways unconscious bias plays out in the real world. For example, we conducted a poll which found that ethnic minorities are much more likely to report being suspected of shoplifting, refused entry to bars and clubs or being unfairly overlooked for promotion at work.

While some of our biases may begin on an unconscious level, experts caution that the concept of unconscious bias should not absolve people of discriminatory behaviour. “If you’re aware of these associations then you can bring to bear all of your critical skills and intelligence to see it’s wrong to think like that,” says Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist who studies prejudice and social learning at University College London. “We all have the ability to control that.”

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Once in the Commons there are new challenges. “Parliament is very chummy, very clubby,” said Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich South. He went through what is often anecdotally reported by minorities in overwhelmingly white workplaces – an unexplained isolation. He asked himself: “Is it just your personality that means you’re isolated? Or is it a confluence of factors of which race is one that means you are not always quite accepted?”

Over time he concluded there was a hierarchy, and that minority MPs in the Labour party were the “poor relation”. Siddiq echoed this sentiment, pointing out that those appointed and considered for senior roles within parliament were rarely from an minority ethnic background. Heads of select committees overwhelmingly tend to be white, and party leadership nominees and house speaker shortlists seem reserved for white MPs only. When ethnic minorities did get the opportunity to take on roles for which they were qualified, it could feel like box-ticking where they “just wanted an ethnic”, Siddiq said.

Afolami sees race as only one way in which he is different, rather than apart, from his white colleagues. But where Afolami, Lewis and Siddiq agree is that there is a race tithe which means one must always tread with care. That means additional scrutiny, whether it is simply for being different to what people are accustomed to, or because there is less tolerance for black and minority ethnic MPs to be outspoken or make mistakes that others get away with.

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Both Lewis and Siddiq mentioned media assaults on them that fed into racist tropes. The Daily Mail ran a piece asking where Siddiq’s “loyalties lie” because her aunt is the prime minister of Bangladesh. Lewis strongly believes that Chuka Umunna suffered from unconscious bias when he thought he could be leader of the Labour party and was seen as “uppity”.

Jess Phillips telling Diane Abbott to “fuck off” during a meeting of Labour MPs was cited as an example of the kind of behaviour that would not be tolerated if the situation were reversed and it was a black junior female MP doing the same to, say, Harriet Harman. And more recently, many observers have felt that the treatment of the shadow minister Kate Osamor – who resigned over the saga of her son’s drug conviction and allegations that she was dishonest over her dealings with the court – has betrayed a set of assumptions and judgments that would not be applied to a white politician in the same position.

The relatively small number of minority MPs means, some of them suggest, that there is an unconscious discounting of their authority, and an inflation of the wisdom of a counterpart who fits the traditional mould. The only way for that problem to change is for the underlying numbers to change as well.

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The right solution is still a matter for debate. What Labour could do better, said Bilal Mahmood, was to “scout” prospective MPs and incubate them. Lewis believes that all-women shortlists have squeezed out black men, and so all-minority shortlists are even more of a necessity. But Afolami said that, like his party, he was “allergic” to the idea of all-minority shortlists. According to him, it is harder to earn the respect of your peers if they think you are there because of tokenism, rather than ability.

As the parties continue to grapple with those questions, the heavy lifting seems to still be the work of minority MPs themselves, who must steel themselves for an ongoing battle. At the end of a litany of micro-aggressions, I asked Siddiq if the climate in the house depressed her. “No,” she said. “It just makes me more resolved.”